Thursday, December 18, 2014

11th EPISTLE TO THE NEVADANS: A HOLY AND BLESSED CHRISTMAS

It does not matter that Christ was
born long ago in Bethlehem

unless he is born in you today.– Meister Eckhart

Over the
years, I have quoted Meister Eckhart in many a Christmas sermon. The truth of
his words rings like a Christmas bell with its manifest truth. For us, Christ
is not one who just lived well so we could get away with living badly; he
came to set us free from the power of sin so that we might live well ourselves.

It does not matter that Christ was
born long ago in Bethlehem

unless he is born in you today.

And so this
Advent, I am once again waiting to see Christ born in my own life and in the
Church, which is the place of his birth in the human community. But will I see
it?

I recall
toward the end of Advent one year ranting on to my sage consultant about all
the ways my congregation was botching the Christmas services. He said, “Um
hmmm. Um Hmmmm” several times as I groused on. Then when I took a breath, he
said, “Maybe Christ will have to be born in a stable again this year.” And that
rang as true as the wisdom of the 14th century mystic, Meister
Eckhart.

It does not matter that Christ was
born long ago in Bethlehem

unless he is born in you today.

Maybe Christ will have to be born in
a stable again this year.

Advent is
purgatorial. One night this week we drove through the early darkness in jam-packed
aggravating urban traffic to Trader Joe’s for a minor grocery shopping only to
find that the traffic and irritability on the inside matched the traffic and
irritability outside. It was chaotic – like a stable. I did not cheer myself
with untimely Christmas carols. They only make it worse. That’s part of why I
like being an Episcopalian. We know good and well it isn’t “the most wonderful
time of the year” – yet. Instead I hummed the Merle Haggard classic, If we can make it through December.

It has
seemed to be a hard time for a lot of us this year. My best friend from 40 year
ago wrote me about this urge he sometimes has to phone his son, but his son
died last year. A deacon tells me how this season makes her miss her late
husband. I find myself missing my parents, my brother, any number of people I
wasn’t even close to, but they made up my world. I miss the world I grew up in,
even though I wasn’t that happy in it at the time. I still miss it.

We Episcopalians
don’t have to make a grouchy principle out of insisting there is something hard
and challenging about Advent. There just is.

My older
daughter gave birth this week. It was a long, hard labor and a dangerous
delivery. As I think about that long day and night of bringing forth -- the
pain, the exhaustion, the anxiety -- I ask how is Christ brought forth in us?
For Christ to be born in us today –
what does that take? What does it look like? What does it actually mean in some
fleshy way that a simple person like me can get his mind around and recognize? Is
it in some way like my daughter’s long hard labor and delivery. Is it hard and
risky.

And I find
the first few clues in Scripture. Paul said to the Philippians,

“have the same mind in you that was
in Christ Jesus, who being found in the form of God did not count equality with
God a thing to be grasped but humbled himself, taking the form of a servant . .
. .

When Christ
is born in the mucky stable of our lives, he shows up as a humility, a
lowliness. Paul was admonishing the Philippians to refrain from ego-defending,
ego-asserting conflicts over who would get their way. Christ shows up in us as
a certain indifference to getting our way, as a humility that looks at others
with an eye seeking something to respect, not criticize. Let your minds be filled with everything that is true, everything that
is honorable, upright, and pure everything that we love and admire.” Christ
appears in us as an eye that can see the good in others. Like Superman seeing
through walls, we can see through the off-putting or threatening personality to
see the image of God hidden in the heart.

Christ is
born in us when we sincerely pray Our
Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done .
. . “

We say praying shapes believing, and out
of our beliefs come our actions, and repeated actions shape our characters.
Christ appears in us as a prayer relating to God as Father, inviting his
Kingdom into our world, and submitting our lives and our world to his will. It
is a simple prayer of surrender, confession, forgiveness, a sharing – sharing
in that Jesus’ prayer is all in the first person plural, our father, our daily
bread, our sins, those who sin
against us. Christ happens when we
pray our way into a link to God that inevitably ties us to the whole human
race. If God is our Father, we are all brothers and sisters.

Christ is
born in us when the same spirit that filled him animates and vitalizes our
lives, shapes our actions.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor,
to heal the broken-hearted,

he has sent me to proclaim liberty
to the captives,

sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor (forgiveness of debts).

When we do
that work – and it is hard work – we are giving birth to Christ. We are
becoming the Church (represented by Mary) the Theotokos, the God-bearer.

Christ will
be born again in us, born in this stable. He is always born in stables. He is
only born in stables. He is born when we lay down our pride, love our Father,
and serve our brothers and sisters, not with pity but with respect for the
beauty and the goodness we see in them. Christ is born in us when we see the
world through Jesus’ eyes and act on what we see.